#tmp critical

[anghraine]

So, I am generally an epithet hater when it comes to narration. The notorious sorts of examples are "the blond," "the Brazilian," "the green-eyed girl" and so on instead of names or pronouns, but it definitely sets my teeth on edge. Professions are mostly fine by me, while race/species/nationality tends to be the most obnoxious and jarring, even when entirely fictitious.

Now, in fairness, this is just a really common awkward writing misstep, especially when there are enough characters of the same gender that pronouns lack clarity and the writer isn't used to seeing names used over and over. (It's not that different from changing the dialogue tag every sentence to avoid over-using "said," not realizing how much more jarring it often is to read replied/shouted/whispered/gasped/declared/etc one after the other than said.) It's not that big a deal most of the time.

I did notice early on that ST fic seems to use these a lot more than in other fandoms I'd been in. There's especially a lot of "the Vulcan," " the human," and so forth. I find "the Vulcan" especially jarring for Spock and most of all in a Spock POV, given that it's a lot more fraught and complex for him specifically, and it seems improbably useless for him to think of another crew member as "the human" given that 430+ of them are humans. But I mostly shrugged it off.

But I feel moved to point out that, in addition to the many other issues with Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture (a script he didn't write and doesn't appear to understand especially well), he does this allllllllll the time and way more obnoxiously than the most amateurish fan writer. He describes Uhura as "the fine-featured Bantu," for instance, thus far I'm pretty sure he refers to Ilia more often as "the Deltan" than by name, and there's so much "the Vulcan" for Spock that it's painful. It doesn't make me like the device itself or Roddenberry's absolutely dire prose any better, but you know, let's put things into perspective.

And in the interests of full disclosure, I did laugh outright at an instance of this in an article written by a pro journalist rather than a fic writer or Hollywood guy prone to godawful prose. It was a ST-related thing from just a few years ago, but I don't remember the exact subject, only the fact that the journalist simply referred to William Shatner as "the Canadian."

Not "the Canadian actor" either. It was just Known Canadian Bill Shatner. And at that point, I was like ... okay, fine, the epithets win.

[anghraine]

Friends, I seek assistance!

J and I, having suffered through the TMP novelization, felt the need to ritually cleanse ourselves by watching Star Trek: the Motion Picture itself. Whatever its flaws, it is not that.

However, it's still... like, half a film of material stretched like Bilbo Baggins' lifespan. Therefore, we are contemplating a TMP drinking game that will make the time pass a little more easily, but J's hard cider is 19% and we don't want to, you know, die. So, does anyone have suggestions for a non-fatal TMP drinking game?

[anghraine]

So, the entire household went out to dinner at an Applebee's, because Ashe hadn't been there in years and had a sudden craving and we've wanted to spend more time together as an entire friend group. So there's J (my platonic best friend of 26 years, a very obvious cishet guy), Kh (his girlfriend/my other closest friend from grad school), Ashe (a tall and ultra-fashionable woman, J's closest friend from grad school and a good friend of mine), and me.

I mention all of this because J has been side-eyed as a potential corruptor of good girls' virtue since middle school, usually for at least borderline antisemitic reasons, but sometimes just for reactionary gender nonsense reasons. So he held the door for an older man after Kh, Ashe, and I had all filed out and this guy looked at J in amazement and said "you have three ladies, wow."

(It's not the first time someone has presumed that four 30-something friends living in a house in the PNW for financial reasons could only be a complicated polycule when one of the four is a man. It's especially not the first time he and I in particular have been assumed to be a couple, to the point that he's sometimes dryly referred to our house as "the fuck palace" to go by popular opinion.)

So that happened!

On a funnier note, we got through several more chapters of the TMP novelization. More on that later, but he took up the dramatic reading at the point at which Scotty takes Kirk to see the Enterprise. It basically reads like Roddenberry is desperately trying to make it sound pornographic anyway, so J went for the obvious option of reading it in hushed melodramatic tones, and I was laughing hard enough that I nearly cried and was like, "Do you think the Enterprise is wearing sexy lingerie?"

[anghraine]

Speaking of J, he got me a Christmas present labeled "enjoy the footnote" and, since I've been creeping back to research after a year of exhaustion, I was thinking it would be something to do with early modern studies or literary theory or adaptation or something—and instead it was the novelization of Star Trek: the Motion Picture complete with all the unhinged Roddenberryisms :D

I will say, given how often details that are absolutely not in the film or show but instead from the novelization get presented as uncomplicated canon facts that must be integrated into the experience of watching TOS or the movies or TNG etc, I was immediately surprised by several things:

Spock yearningly thinking of Kirk as his t'hy'la prior to kolinahr (what could go wrong?) happens on the first page. Like, before the title page and the copyright information. And it's before the preface ostensibly written by Kirk (though it sounds nothing whatsoever like Kirk). And it's before the second preface from the in-universe author, with quibbling footnotes. Roddenberry is to introductory material as hobbits are to breakfast.

The thing about Kirk sounding nothing like TOS Kirk, and the fundamentally implausible gaps in characterization between the TOS characterizations (esp but not only of Kirk) and the movie and/or novelization characterizations is explained in the prefaces (whether there should be a distinction between the film/the novelization isn't clear at this point; I'm still early in the book, but TMP the film explains nothing whatsoever about how the characters we knew in TOS could end up where they're at in TMP because TMP is a barely-veiled reboot).

The explanation is what I can only describe as canonception: in the continuity of the novelization, Star Trek the show exists in-story as some fictionalized documentary thing that's more or less the same as TOS, and which TMP!novelization!Kirk considers fairly inaccurate (the in-universe editor has some mildly skeptical commentary on this but doesn't seriously question it). As a result, he demanded the in-universe author of the novelization (who was significantly involved in the in-universe quasi-documentary that is actually called STAR TREK, his caps, but may or may not be exactly a TV show) submit his manuscript account of the events of TMP to the oversight of all the people involved including Kirk himself, Uhura, Spock, Nogura, etc. (Roddenberry does not seem to remotely understand that this would be highly sketchy nor how creepy, reactionary, and paranoid the universe of the novelization is in general.) IIRC there was also at some point an idea that the novelizations and some other "beta canon" type stuff exists in-story for at least some of the Star Trek shows, but are fictionalized works or other intrinsically limited and possibly inaccurate in-universe documents within their continuities.

So TOS itself does not actually share the simple flat continuity beloved of modern franchises with the TMP novelization. As far as the novelization is concerned, TOS is a vaguely approximate fictionalized account of the actual five-year mission that exists in the continuity of the novelization (and maybe TMP itself). The novelizations etc are, similarly, somewhat questionable documents within the continuity of any Star Trek show insofar as they exist at all in the continuities of any show. Neither the show nor novelization are uncomplicatedly canon for the other, although they exist in-story in some capacity. It feels a bit like Roddenberry went on a bender with some really dubious drugs and The Silmarillion and this was the result. (I actually find it kind of charming and this approach certainly easier to believe than contemporary Grand Unified Theories of Lore without regard to what the significance of any of that lore was. )

The universe is kind of awful, though! It's wild that this is just a few years before Roddenberry started mandating a tediously bland, unchallenging concept of utopia that hobbled early TNG—because Kirk is outfitted with an implant in his head and Starfleet is keeping the fact that senior officers are outfitted with, well, tech implants a secret from the public because of a previous multi-year series of wars (not the Eugenics Wars, later ones) involving some similar devices that went horribly wrong, and we're assured that Starfleet only uses these implants to send crucial emergency information and it's actually super rare to beam information into officers' brains like that (and also comically unclear and slow to arrive). But still, The Public Cannot Know.

Also there's a whole (transparently conservative fever dream) tangent about how the earlier, more intellectual generation in Starfleet were academics and philosophers who were so open to new ideas and adaptable and evolved as humans that they got seduced by alien philosophies and couldn't be depended on. Starfleet had to rely on less evolved, less progressive, but more disciplined people the prefaces keep calling "primitives" to hold their mission together at all. Kirk claims his year was the first that "primitives" such as himself were recruited instead of the more evolved and intellectual humans (the in-universe editor thinks Kirk is somewhat misrepresenting his own place in all this because he's just so modest, which itself is... lmao as a character beat).

There's one uncomplicatedly solid note: Roddenberry halts the acid trip long enough to remark that merely tolerating others' differences is not adequate, you have to go beyond that, then breezes on. Interesting take from a raging misogynist and antisemite, but not wrong.

[anghraine]

I have a post I'll get to at some point about it, but J and I have progressed further through the TMP novelization by Roddenberry, and while I can't begin to describe everything in it, I'll just mention a few phrases that have entered our collective vocabulary as a result:

the mutant farming of prehistoric civilizations

the forthcoming mind control riots

the fuck deck

canonception

does the Enterprise wear lingerie?

the intrinsic eroticism of a woman's bald head

like a sexy fawn

for his girlfriend/my other closest friend Kh: as an all-too-scrutable Asian, myself,

[anghraine]

an-artsy-girl000 replied to this post (but presumably actually this one):

Decker was asbolutely in the right. The good thing about this movie is that it never tries to make Decker into the obnoxious villain you paint him out to be. He's hurt, yes. But he's always making rational decisions and never panicking. Kirk is also partly right- he is definitely more experienced than Decker. But he doesn't know the ship anymore. He's driven by his ego, more than Decker is, but even then, he knows when to admit someone else was right. All that to say, Decker and Kirk are super well written. Neither is perfect, and that's why their characterization is so fucking good

I nowhere said nor meant that Decker is a villain, though yes, I do think his behavior is deeply obnoxious and short-sighted long past the point when it's justifiable. Villainy would be trying to get Earth's population wiped out on purpose. Decker merely recommends an approach to the V'ger crisis (over and over and over, even after Spock's arrival) that would unintentionally have that result, which is less competent than doing it on purpose but definitely not villainous.

His conduct as first officer is additionally unprofessional and petty, but as I also said, I think that is a much smaller issue than his relative weakness as a tactician. I firmly believe that Decker is unqualified for full command of this particular mission, all the more given the number of lives at stake and his own tactical recommendations throughout the mission. That doesn't mean he's unqualified to command any mission, or that he's secretly malevolent, he's just not the guy for this job.

And the thing is, given the stakes set up by the plot of TMP, this is not really a situation where you can split the baby. After the early refits learning curve (which Decker is not uniquely qualified to assist with), his ongoing recommendations would have been disastrous for billions of people had Kirk followed them. Like, either—

a) these recommendations are not what Decker actually thinks should be done. Had he retained command, he would have made the kinds of decisions Kirk does in TMP that allow for even the possibility of success, in which case his contrary advice as first officer is wildly unprofessional at the worst conceivable time, or

b) he's actually being honest about thinking slow and cautious tactics are the way to deal with the V'ger crisis, in which case he's a deeply inferior commander for this specific mission, and it was for the best that Starfleet placed the survival of Earth's population in the hands of someone more experienced, gifted, and decisive (clearly indicated by Uhura's chiding remark about how Kirk receiving command had doubled their chances of success).

Either way, Decker's wrong in the circumstances. Yeah, it sucked for him personally, and yes, he was right about a few specific orders early on, but I think he's absolutely wrong in the big-picture sense that matters a lot more. There are just far more important things going on during all this than him being mildly screwed over, and he doesn't seem to recognize the urgency or priority of those in the way that Kirk, Uhura, and eventually Spock do.

Also, we have even deeper disagreements if you think Decker is that well-written. The writing of him isn't godawful, but I don't think it's anything like good, much less super good. If anything, I think the script is probably more unkind to Decker and Ilia than any other major characters, to a degree that feels unfair. IMO pretty much all the best dialogue in TMP goes to Spock or Kirk, and even with them, there's a lot that's carried by Nimoy's and Shatner's performances far more than the writing, as well as by the audience already more or less knowing them.

I think Decker's and Ilia's dialogue in TMP is mediocre, not helped by so much of their characterization and motives getting lost in the shuffle from Phase II to TMP (even the conflict between Kirk and Decker is mainly an artifact of late reshuffling; Decker had been envisioned as a personable first officer who idolizes Kirk almost as a father while Kirk is deliberately grooming him for command). And Decker's actor in particular does not have the screen presence to elevate the dubious writing the way that Nimoy and Shatner do in TMP, or Frakes and Sirtis in TNG for that matter. Riker and Troi are obviously much-improved second drafts of Decker and Ilia but still suffer from plenty of bad writing, yet the actors bring a ton of warmth and charm to the characters in a way that I don't think succeeds in TMP.